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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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More works of
literary criticism should be written with the kind of moral imagination
exercised in Rod Dreher’s How Dante Can Save Your Life (Regan Arts,
2015). Dreher himself balks at calling his book “literary criticism,”
preferring to use medically inspired terminology; words like “bibliotherapy”
and “self-help” spring up throughout the book as self-identifying markers. Such
therapeutic language translates for the contemporary reader the complicated,
you might say medieval, act of reading on display throughout the book.
In other words, Dreher practices an interactive reading of which Dante himself
would have approved.

The
striking title is meant to be taken literally. Heavily biographical, the book
follows Dreher’s path from a potentially life threatening, stress-related
condition to the way of wellness offered by Dante. In brief, an Epstein-Barr
virus aggravated by stress incapacitated Dreher with chronic mononucleosis, a
condition that makes the sufferer 33 percent more likely to contract lymphoma.
Remarkably, the act of reading Dante’s masterwork, known in English as The
Divine Comedy, proves to be his needed remedy.

The
recovery comes not simply from an extended act of meditation, for which any
long work of poetry or reflective prose might have served. No, Dreher needs
Dante specifically, since reading Dante means direct application of Dante’s
content to Dreher’s own life circumstances. The fact that The Divine Comedy charts an imagined journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven does not
dissuade Dreher from finding parallels with his own life. Indeed, the
otherworldly setting might make it easier for him to relate. Dante’s book works
like a pebble dropped in a pond, sending ripples through Dreher’s day-to-day experiences. Beyond mere entertainment on the one hand or mere “how-to” on
the other, reading Dante becomes a fully immersive, life-changing act for him.

Dreher
is known as a proponent of local, intentional living, so medieval Italian
poetry is not his usual stomping grounds. In previous writings like Crunchy
Cons (2006) and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013), he
championed the virtues of family and community, and his writing style reflects
this disposition. An amiable and conversational prose characterizes this new
book as it limns Southern life and family with a raconteur’s love for the
idiosyncratic. How Dante is premised on Dreher’s own attempts to live
locally. In the course of his career as a student and as a journalist, Dreher
had separated himself from his Louisiana upbringing. Due in large part to the
untimely death of his sister, Dreher relocated in 2011 to his birthplace of
West Feliciana, Louisiana, in order to be closer to family. Only after the
move, and contrary to his intentions, does Dreher discover that living around
family has an acute effect upon his health.

As
much as this book is about Dreher’s personal story, it is also a book about the
value of storytelling, and how stories affect the way we live. Upon returning
home, Dreher had placed himself in the role of the prodigal son. Yet, unlike in
the parable, tension continues to mount between him and his family,
particularly with his father, which frustrates Dreher’s self-­narrative. He
does not receive a lavish welcome; there is no fatted calf. Instead of a jovial
feast, he meets with illness. This is where Dante enters the scene, where
Dreher discovers that his case demands a new narrative.

A
reader who has never experienced the decentering influence of a book might well
wonder at such a turn of events: How can a seven-hundred-year-old poem have
such a profound effect on a twenty-first-century reader? Dante’s Divine
Comedy is, among other things, a work of speculative fiction. Like today’s
speculative genres, it speaks more about the conditions of the present than
about the future, since it extrapolates present concerns forward in time.
Because Dante’s vision of the future is of the afterlife, its present
conditions have the potential to encompass times outside of Dante’s own day and
age. Unlike, say, a future set in 1984, a year that came and went, Dante’s
future is set perpetually before the living. Dreher finds in Dante a kindred
spirit because Dante means to speak universally about “our life.”

As
Dreher journeys with Dante, he employs the language of therapy to explain his
act of reading, because he wants other pilgrims to join him. The concept of
bibliotherapy might offer readers some understanding of what Dante means to
Dreher, but the concept nevertheless remains limited. Therapy speaks to the way
a text can lead to wellness, but it does not necessarily indicate the moral
stakes involved. Dreher’s illness required treatment of the will, not just the
mind. In a letter most likely written by Dante himself, we find another means
of understanding Dreher’s method of reading:

It should be understood
that there is not just a single sense in [The Divine Comedy]: it might
rather be called polysemous, that is, having several senses. For the first
sense is that which is contained in the letter, while there is another which is
contained in what is signified by the letter. The first is called literal, the
second called allegorical, or moral or anagogical. (trans., Robert Haller)

By
applying Dante’s journey to his own life circumstances, Dreher intuits that a
literal reading of Dante must entail another kind of reading, an allegorical
reading, which includes a moral reading. Medieval exegetes called the attempt
to draw moral direction from the Bible “tropology,” assuming that a proper
interpretation of scripture will provoke formative change in the reader, and
Dante famously encouraged this hermeneutic for reading his own writings. This
is certainly an audacious claim, but for hundreds of years readers have borne
witness to its legitimacy.

Moral,
or tropological, readings may be lost in the larger category of allegory, as
most attention to Dante’s work has dwelled on allegory in either positive or
negative ways. What Dreher offers is a specifically tropological reaction.
Contemplating hell, purgatory, and heaven, he repeatedly applies Dante’s text
to his own moral actions, often prompting acts of confession. When Dante meets
two rival Epicureans, Farinata degli Uberti and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, in
the circle of hell assigned to heretics, Dreher reflects on the similar
tensions existing between him and his father. The two Epicureans, related by
the marriage of their children, dwell forever in mutual derision in the same
sepulcher, thinking exclusively of their own family’s worth. Faranata’s first
question to Dante reveals the self-importance both Epicureans display: “Who
were your ancestors?” The irony, of course, is that Faranata holds on to the
belief that only ancestry bequeaths dignity, all the while burning within a
tomb. To Dreher’s shock, it was the prioritizing of family over greater goods
that became part of the heretics’ torment. Dreher sees the same ­misplaced
priorities within his family: “We loved good things—family and place—too much,”
and only after seeing his condition displayed by the damned does he recognize
the need to alter his behavior.

Such
an emphasis on the proper ordering of goods structures Dante’s entire vision of
the afterlife, and Dreher finds various applications to his life in the whole
gamut of sins on display in Inferno, even in the deepest pits of hell. Reading through the Divine Comedy, Dreher thus performs the ascetic
practice of kenosis, of emptying one’s self. Only after complete
humility is his life ready to be rebuilt, a task which he admits is ongoing. In
the next stage of Dante’s journey, Purgatorio, Dreher skirts debate
about the theology of purgatory, focusing instead on the trials of everyday
life. He attempts, along with the penitent sinners being purged, to reshape the
disordered goods in his life. In Paradiso, he glimpses the completion of
this life’s journey, in which all things are ordered toward God, who, in
Dreher’s self-scrutinizing words, is “the only safe harbor and our only true
home.”

The
resulting narrative is undoubtedly told from the standpoint of Dreher’s faith,
yet he seeks to be as ecumenical as possible. He reads a medieval Roman
Catholic text, he is Eastern Orthodox, raised Methodist, and his therapeutic
language attempts to secularize the moral understanding he receives.
Accordingly, Dante’s wide vision of the afterlife offers the hope of a future
community where those separated by divisions may be united. Looking forward
beyond present divisions, seeing wholeness as a future condition rather than a
present one, becomes part of Dreher’s understanding.

An
important implication of Dreher’s book is that great literature can offer this
road to wellness when other avenues may be less effective. His reading of Dante
works in concert with visits to a therapist and to his Orthodox priest, yet his
progress is articulated by what he learns from Dante. The psychological and
spiritual benefits presented by therapy and religious instruction are made more
accessible to Dreher through the images and ideas dramatized by Dante’s
narrative. In On Beauty and Being Just (2001), the literary theorist
Elaine Scarry makes a similar case, that beauty in literature can reorder our
passions by displacing the ego. How Dante enlivens theory with personal
experience, while at the same time presenting a specifically Christian trajectory
to life’s fulfillment.

If
this use of literature risks sounding utilitarian, it becomes useful only
inasmuch as one is able to avoid treating literature as a tool. Only in merging
with Dante’s journey does Dreher gradually move toward wellness. The understanding
of literature that best fits Dreher’s experience is one of the oldest: that
literature’s function is to teach and to delight. The truths that Dreher
uncovers about himself, his family, and God are taught simultaneously with the
complex enjoyments of a poetic story.

Again
and again, the book highlights the power of narrative to provoke action, and it
is perhaps weakest when it attempts to look like a self-help book (for example,
the takeaway boxes provided at the end of each chapter). It is in its
storytelling and in its appreciation of Dante’s story­telling that the book
shines. Just as Dreher’s personal story gradually unfolds over the course of
reading Dante, so his language of genre develops away from the vague domains of
self-help. Near the end of his reading of the Inferno, Dreher offers a
distinction emphasized in the Orthodox faith. He explains the difference
between the idol and the icon: an idol becomes a god in itself, pointing no
further, while icons point to a good beyond themselves. More so than the
language of therapy, this terminology suits how Dreher understands Dante, how
he wants Dante to be understood. In Dreher’s understanding, The Divine
Comedy is iconic.

Dreher’s
book is a fascinating example of how life-changing a good story can be. But
dwelling too long on the theoretical implications of the book risks forgetting
that, with works of literary art, the teaching should not be disassociated from
the delight. If a reader were to approach Dante only as palliative medicine,
Dreher’s point would have been lost. In an age of therapies, one must sometimes
learn to enjoy what is good. Dreher’s book offers this guidance.

Gabriel Haley is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University,
Nebraska.